For about three minutes the Kid stands lookin' after her without sayin' a word. He acts like he has stopped one with his chin!

"The big English stiff!" he busts out finally. "What does he mean by comin' over here and gettin' me in a jam with my girl? I'll get that bird, though, believe me!"

"What are you gonna do?" I says.

"I'm gonna take that solemn-faced simp back of the African Desert and give him a chance at the welterweight title!" he snorts. "I'll wallop that bird till he'll wish he had stayed over in dear old England and—"

"Stoppa!" comes a voice from the back of us, and we look around into the muzzles of two automatics. On the other end of them was Tony!

"I hear everyt'ing!" he snarls, wavin' the guns and glarin' at us. "I hear everyt'ing!"

The Kid looks at the guns and coughs, kinda nervous. I was glancin' at friend Tony, myself.

"Ain't that nice!" I remarks, feelin' my way carefully.

"What you mean?" snarls the ex-"No spika da Engleesh."

"Bein' able to hear everything," I explains, thinkin' to humour him. "I'll bet right now you're listenin' to a little spicy scandal at some King's palace, eh?"

"Don't got funny!" he warns me.

"Ha! ha!" snickers the Kid. "Where d'ye get that got funny stuff?"

"What'sa that?" yells Tony, whirlin' on him and shovin' the guns under his nose.

The Kid gets pale and shuffles back a few steps.

"No spika da Engleesh!" he pipes, holdin' up his hand.

"Pah!" grunts Tony, registerin' disgust. "Me—I laugh at you! All the tima you talk 'bout Meester Van Ness, I standa righta here with the ear wide open. You no feexa nobody—maybe Tony he'sa feexa you! I hear you say you no lika Meester Van Ness because he'sa no laugha. Sure, he'sa laugha—but not all the tima on the streeta like crazee fel'. When Meester Van Ness—ah, he'sa granda man—when he'sa wanna laugha, he'sa go home, to he'sa rooma, shutta the door and standa in the corner. Then he'sa a laugha ha! ha! ha! ho! ho! ho!—lika that! That'sa lasta heem all day!"

"Oh, Lady!" says the Kid, holdin' his side. "Can you tie that?" He looks over and sees Van Ness in a clinch with Miss Vincent—and son, you could see the muscles rollin' under his coat sleeves. "Look at the big, ignorant boob now!" he howls.

"Ignoranta!" hisses Tony. "Whata you mean, ignoranta? Seven difference language thisa granda Meester Van Ness he'sa speak! He'sa teacha everybody—joosta lika wan college!"

"Why don't you get him to teach you Eyetalian then, Stupid?" sneers the Kid. "You're a fine thing to luck your way past Ellis Island when you can't even tell me what Bomb Germo means!"

"Don't got funny!" warns Tony. "What gooda now for you be fighting champion for the world, eh? Leetle Tony he'sa standa here calla you names and what can you do, eh? Nothing—joosta nothing! Champion, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Don't maka me laugha, Meester Fightaire!" He shoves the gun in the Kid's face and snarls, "Now!" he says. "Tella Tony you feela sorry for soaka heem in jaw!"

The Kid bites his lip and edges in a bit. Right away I got sorry for Tony!

"I'm sorry!" sneers Scanlan slowly. "Awful sorry—just thinkin' of it has got me all broke up. I meant to let you have it on the beak, but I'll make up for it now!"

He looks over Tony's shoulder suddenly and yells. "Hey, don't throw that!"

If they had rehearsed the act, Tony couldn't have fallen for the plant any harder. He twists his neck around to look back like the Kid figured and Scanlan started one from his left ankle. It caught Tony right on the button—which in English is the point of the chin—and Tony gives a imitation of a seal. He took a dive!

While we're takin' him away from his artillery, I look up and there's Van Ness lookin' down at us and frownin'. He reaches inside that Roman toga thing he's wearin' and comes out with a round piece of glass which he balances on one eye.

"Ah—I say!" he pipes, glarin' at the Kid. "This is getting jolly annoying, my man. It appears that every time we meet, you have just committed a murderous assault upon my dresser! Since you are the—ah—champion fighter of the universe, why do you not joust with more of its inhabitants and not center your activities upon one who knows nothing of the art of self-defense?"

The Kid grunts, takin' away Tony's guns and removin' a couple of them long banana knives from his clothes. Meanwhile, the daredevil dresser is showin' no more signs of life than a sleepin' alligator, so I figured it was about time to pull a little first aid stuff. I turned him over on his back and took off his coat, grabbin' it by the bottom and holdin' it up. They was a sudden crash and—Sweet Cookie! A lot of things fell on the ground, among 'em bein' one set of brass knuckles, one blackjack, two more guns, a thing that looked like a bayonet, five boxes of cartridges, a small bottle of nitro-glycerine and three sticks of dynamite! The last two fell in the folds of the coat, or we'd all have gone away from there. Tony's master looks at the layout with his eyes stickin' so far out of his head you could have knocked 'em off with a cane.

Scanlan eyes him and laughs.

"This is the bird which don't know nothin' about self-defense, eh?" he grins, pointin' to Tony. "Well, if he'd been in Belgium a few years ago, I bet the Germans would never have got through!"

"Oh, I say!" gasps Van Ness. "This is a bit of a shock! Why the fellow is a walking arsenal!"

"He's more like a sleepin' fort, now!" I says, pointin' to Tony on the turf.

"Look at the chances you been takin' havin' a guy like that fasten your garters and so forth," pipes Scanlan. "You ought to thank us for exposin' him!"

Then Tony comes to life and havin' helped him down, the Kid helps him up.

"Sapristi!" remarks Tony, glarin' at him. "You bigga stiffa! Sometime Tony he'sa feexa you for dis! Whata you hitta me with?"

"I think it was a left hook," the Kid tells him, rubbin' his chin, like he ain't sure.

"Aha!" snarls Tony. "I know you never hit with your feest sooch a punch! Don't got funny with me any more! I wanna tella you, you keepa up knock it down Tony every fiva, tena, fifteen minootes and some time Tony he'sa got mad! When Tony he'sa got mad—" He stops and makes a terrible face at me and the Kid, "—when Tony he'sa got mad, something she'sa gotta fall!—dat'sa all!"

"Well, you been doin' all the fallin' so far," I says, "and—"

"Ah—I say!" butts in Van Ness—and Tony sees him for the first time, I guess, because he shivered and got pale. "I say," he goes on, takin' a slant at Tony through the trick eyeglass, "just what does this mean, Antonio? Why are you walking about with this extraordinary collection of weapons on your person?" He points his finger at the munitions on the ground, and Tony's eyes follows his. At the same time he makes a little clickin' noise in his throat and jumps for the pile.

"Where is she the gooda carbolic acid?" he snarls. "And whosa taka my eleven incha stiletto?"

"How dare you ignore my question!" thunders Van Ness. "What are you doing with all those weapons? Answer me!"

"'Scuse a me!" says Tony, makin' a bow and takin' off his hat. "I getta them for my brudda!"

"Where's your brother?" asks the Kid. "In Russia?"

"'Sno use you talka to me!" growls Tony, "I no talka back. Sometime Tony he'sa getta mad and then—"

"Come, come!" interrupts Van Ness, kinda sharp. "The weapons—what of them?"

"'Scuse a me!" bows Tony with another smile. "My brudda he'sa live in Santa Francisco. He'sa fina fel'—my brudda. He'sa name Joe. He'sa come this countree five years ago, no fren's, no spika da Engleesh, no nothing! They putta heem in the basement of the sheepa wit' coupla thousand other fel' from seventy-six other countree. One fel' say my Joe he'sa no be able to leava the sheepa at—at—what you call? I don't know—I teenk maybe Chicago, Pennsylvania, Coney Island—I don't know joosta now! Anyhow thisa fel' say Joe he'sa no be able to leava the sheepa wherever he'sa wanna go—eef he'sa got no money, you 'stanna me? Joe he'sa tank dis kinda fel', say coupla nica prayer for heem and then everybody she'sa a maka sleepa. Joe he'sa get up and taka four hundred dollar from thisa nica fel'—whosa sleepa lika he'sa dead—so Joe he'sa be able to leeva the sheepa! He'sa a smarta fel', eh? That'sa Joe. He'sa my brudda!"

"Oh, Lady!" says the Kid. "What was you takin' him the ammunition for?"

"Don't spika to me!" snorts Tony. "I no answera you! I tella Meester Van Ness. He'sa my boss. He'sa fina fel', too—joosta lika my brudda!"

"How dare you!" splutters Van Ness, his face as red as a ale-hound's nose. "What do you mean by that?"

"'Scuse a me!" says Tony. "Don't get mad for Tony. No spika da Engleesh very gooda—maybe I maka meestake! Joe he'sa writa me come over Santa Francisco queek, because he'sa gotta the trouble wif he'sa landlord. Disa fel' he'sa a wanta da rent maybe, I don't know, but Joe he'sa wanta me bring something so he'sa can feex disa fel' nex' time he come around, you 'stanna me? He say he'sa a bigga fel'—tougha nut! Yesterday I go out and getta wan gun for Joe. Then I teenk maybe that ain't enough for poor leetle Joe against thisa bigga stiffa landlord, so I stoppa drugga store, hardaware, meata store, five, six, sevena place and get somet'ing for Joe he'sa feex landlord. Then I hear thisa fel' say he'sa gonna feexa you!" Tony swings around and points at the Kid. "Tony he'sa don't care if thisa bigga stiffa he's a champion for the world. Tony he's a gotta knifa, gun, dynamite, carbolic acida, everything for fighta. I talka to heem sweeta and he'sa knocka me down wit' a hook! While I sleepa on the dirt, somebody she'sa taka my gooda carbolic acida and stiletto I getta for Joe!"

"Oh, Lady!" yells the Kid, slappin' me on the back. "This guy is a riot!"

"You may go to the hotel, Antonio," says Van Ness, "and await me there. I am surprised and grieved at your beastly conduct!"

Tony hands Van Ness a gun and the bottle of nitro-glycerine.

"Alla right!" he says. "Tony he'sa go. But watcha this two fel' they wanna feexa you. The little fel' you can shoota—but the bigga stiffa whosa knocka me down, he'sa needa more than that! Taka thisa bottle and throw it at heem harda. That'sa blow heem away so far, it taka four thousand dollar for heem to come back on sheepa, thirda class!"

Van Ness puts the gun and the nitro in Tony's pocket.

"Begone, sir!" he says. "I'll jolly well attend to you later!"

Tony gathers up his junk and throwin' a last glare at me and the Kid, beats it.

Van Ness turns to the Kid, stickin' the eyeglass back in the toga.

"Ah—and now, Scanlan," he says, "will you be good enough to explain the cause of the—ah—bitter animosity you have for me?"

The Kid frowns and scratches his head.

"Somebody has been kiddin' you," he tells him. "I ain't got nothin' for you! Where d'ye get that animosity thing?"

Van Ness sighs so hard it like to blowed our hats off.

"It is beastly plain to me," he says, "that I am about as popular in Film City as a cloudburst at a picnic! I am snubbed, ridiculed, vulgarly and subtly insulted! Also I am white and human and—ah—I must confess it has penetrated my skin. You are particularly bitter against me—why?"

The Kid studies him for a minute.

"Listen!" he answers finally. "Are you on the level with this? D'ye really wanna know, or are you simply askin' me so's you can pull one of them witty remarks on the way I answer you—and get walloped on the beak?"

Van Ness did somethin' then I never seen him do before and only once afterward. He grinned! The Roman toga fell off his shoulders, and he leans over with his hands on his hips. On the level, his whole face seemed to change! And then—

Oh, boy!

"Listen, guy!" pipes this big, dignified whatnot. "I'm on the level, all right and I want the lowdown on this thing, d'ye make me?" (Me and the Kid nearly went dead on our feet listenin'.) "As for wallopin' me on the beak, well—you may be welterweight champion out here, but if you start anything with me, I'll remove you from the title, d'ye get that?"

Woof!

The Kid and me falls back against a rock, fightin' for air!

"Oh, Lady!" whispers the Kid, fannin' himself with his hat. "Did you hear what I did?"

"Call me at seven!" I gasps.

"Well—?" drawls Van Ness, lookin' us over.

"They's just one thing I'd like to know," murmurs the Kid, wipin' his forehead with my handkerchief in the excitement. "What part of dear old England was you born in?"

Van Ness grins some more.

"Brooklyn!" he says, jerkin' out the eye glass again and stickin' it on his eye. "Surely, my man," he goes on, with that old silly stare of his; "surely you have heard of jolly old Brooklyn—what?"

"I know it well!" says the Kid. "It's on the wrong end of the bridge! But where d'ye get the 'my man' thing? And what have you been goin' around like a Swiss duke or somethin', when it turns out you're only a roughneck from Brooklyn? You wanna know why you don't belong, and don't fit in here, eh? Well, you big hick, where d'ye get that Sedate Sam stuff?" He slaps Van Ness on the arm. "Why in the Hail Columbia don't you bust out and giggle now and then, hey?"

"Why don't I?" snarls Van Ness, "Don't you think I'd like to? Don't you think I would if I could, you boob?"

"Would if you could?" repeats the Kid. "What's the matter—have you got lockjaw?"

"No!" roars Van Ness, so sudden that we both sidestepped. "No! Not lockjaw, worse! Dignity!"

"Have you give the mud baths at Hot Springs a play?" I asks.

"Stop it!" he sneers. "Cease that small time comedy! I'm the most dignified person in the world—the undisputed champion! I'm Frowning Frank and Imposing Ike rolled into one. It hurts me more than it does you, but I can't help it! I fail to remember the last time I enjoyed a hearty laugh and I know it will be a darned long space before I'll snicker again. My laugher has gone unused for so long that it's atrophied and won't work. I've tried warming it up by going home at night and guffawing before the mirror, but the result is only a mirthless giggle—a ghostly chortle! Of course, I wouldn't dare attempt to laugh in public!"

"Do what?" asks the Kid.

"Laugh!" answers Van Ness bitterly. "I can't even let myself think of doing it—why, it would ruin me! My dignity is all I have. It's my stock in trade and without it I would lose my income! Were I to unbend and shatter the air with harmless cachinnation, it would be thought at once that I had been drinking!" He stopped and sighed some more. "It began ten years ago," he goes on. "I was playing small parts in a stock company and one week I was cast for a Roman senator. Being anxious to make good, I made that noble so dignified that the local critics dismissed the play with a few paragraphs and gave half a column to my stately bearing! That started it, and from that time I've played nothing but Romans, kings, governors, cardinals and similar roles, calling for my infernal talent in the one direction. Mechanically I grew to playing them on and off, yet all the time within me burns the desire to do rough and tumble, yes, by Heaven, slapstick comedy! But alas, I lack the moral courage to throw off the yoke!"

"Well, Mister Van Ness—" I begins, when the silence begun to hurt, "I—"

"Not Van Ness!" he interrupts. "The name is as false as my manner! My name is Fink, Eddie Fink, and please don't add the Mister. When a lad I had a nickname, but, alas, I—"

"What was it?" butts in the Kid.

He hesitates.

"Well, it was rather frivolous," he says. "As indeed I was myself—a happy, carefree youth! The boys called me Foolish—Foolish Fink!" He throws out his chest like he just realized how he had been honored at the time.

Me and the Kid both had a coughin' fit.

"Let's go over to Montana Bill's," I says, when I thought it was safe to look up, "and we'll talk it over."

"Yeh!" chimes in the Kid. "Over a tray of private stock!" He laughs and slaps alias Van Ness on the shoulder. "Cheer up! Foolish Fink, will you have a little drink? Woof, woof! I'm a poet!"

"Thanks!" says Van Ness. "But I'm on the wagon. I stopped drinking five years ago, because under the influence of alcohol I've been known to act the fool!"

"You ain't the only one!" says the Kid. "Anyhow I never touch it myself and Johnny here only uses it on his hair! But come on over—you can have your pants pressed or take a shine, I'm gonna buy, and you might as well get in on it. Bill's got a laughin' hyena in a cage outside, and maybe you could get him to rehearse you!"

About a week after that, the society bunch in Frisco comes over to Film City to act in a picture for the benefit of the electric fan fund for Greenland, or somethin' like that. About fifty of the future corespondents, known to the trade as the younger set, blows over in charge of a dame who had passed her thirty-sixth birth and bust day when Napoleon was a big leaguer. She had did well by herself though and when dressed for the street, they was harder things to look at than her. Also, when her last husband died, he left her a bankroll that when marked in figures on paper looked like it was the number of Southerners below Washington. A little bit of a guy, which turned around when you yelled "G. Herbert Gale" at him, breezed over with her and at first I had him figured as a detective seekin' divorce evidence, because he stuck to that dame like a cheap vaudeville act does to the American flag. He trailed a few paces behind her everywhere she went, callin' her "Mrs. Roberts-Miller" in public and "Helen Dear" when he figured nobody was listenin'. It was easy to see that he had crashed madly in love with this charmer, but as far as she was concerned they was nothin' stirrin'.

Except that G. Herbert was inclined to be a simp, he wasn't a bad guy at that. He mixed well and bought freely, although he was riveted to the water wagon himself. He bragged to me in fact that the nearest he ever come to alcohol in his life was once when he used it to clean his diamonds.

But G. Herbert was the guy that invented the ancient and honorable order of village cut-ups. I never asked him what the G stood for in his name, I guessed it the first day he was in our midst. It meant "Giggle!" This here Herbert person was a laughin' fool! The first time I talked with him I thought I was cheatin' myself by only bein' Scanlan's manager. I figured I ought to be in vaudeville knockin' 'em dead for five hundred a week, because G. Herbert roared at everything I said. He screamed with mirth at all the old ones and had hysterics over three or four witty remarks I remembered from a show I seen the night of the Johnstown flood. I thought, of course, it was the way I put the stuff over, and I was just gonna give the Kid my fare-you-well, when I seen G. Herbert standin' by a practical undertakers shop that was fixed up for a fillum. The little simp was standin' over a coffin laughin' his head off!

That cured me, but him and the Kid become great little pals. I found out later it was on account of G. Herbert snickerin' at the Kid's comedy. Scanlan hadn't discovered it was a habit with this guy, and he claimed here was a feller that knowed humor when he seen it.

One afternoon I see Scanlan and Miss Vincent whisperin' together like yeggmen outside a postoffice. They called me over, and the Kid tells me that the society bunch was gonna leave us flat on the midnight train, and before they blowed, Potts was gonna give 'em a dinner and dance. All the movie crowd was to mix with Frisco's four hundred, so's that both could enjoy the experience and say they took a chance once in their lives.

But the thing that was botherin' Miss Vincent—(Some dame, that! She was the world's champion woman, believe me!) The thing that worried her was G. Herbert and Helen Dear, alias Mrs. Roberts-Miller. Likin' 'em both, Miss Vincent wanted to hurl 'em together for good and all before the train pulled out.

It seems the only objection the dame had to G. Herbert was the fact that he couldn't keep from laughin'. She had him figured as a eighteen-carat simp and frequently told him so, addin' that she could never marry a man who was shy on dignity. Then she gets a flash at our old pal Jason Van Ness or Eddie Fink, as he claimed, and she fell so hard for him she liked to broke her neck! Here was the only original Sedate Sam! Here was the guy she was willin' and anxious to lead to the altar and then to the old safe deposit vault! He was so handsome! So dignified! Such a splendid actor! That's the stuff she was always handin' poor little G. Herbert and askin' him why he wasn't like that? G. Herbert would shake his head, giggle, and say he didn't know why, but he'd ask his parents.

Van Ness couldn't see Helen Dear with opera glasses. He told me he hated 'em stout, and, if possible, had figured on weddin' somebody within ten years of his age—either way. I then felt it my duty to inform him that her bankroll was stouter than she was. He goes into high speed on the dignity thing and sets sail for Helen Dear like a bloodhound after a nigger. He didn't want to look like a vulgar fortune hunter, he claimed, but he figured if he could get his fingers on a piece of Helen's dough, he could bribe G. Herbert to teach him the art of laughin'.

The Kid tells Miss Vincent to forget about the thing, and he would guarantee that G. Herbert and Helen Dear went away threatenin' to marry each other. She said she'd leave the matter in our hands and held hers out. I shook it and Scanlan kissed it—a trick he stole from Van Ness.

The dinner and dance that night was a knockout! Film City is lit up like a plumber used to be on Saturday night, and the inhabitants is dressed like the people that poses for the ads of any cigarette over fifteen cents a pack. As usual, Miss Vincent had the rest of the dames lookin' like sellin' platers in stake race and, believe me, some of them society girls would have worried Venus. The Kid was so swelled up because she kept within easy call all night that he forgot his promise to fix up G. Herbert with Helen Dear. The latter, as we remark at the laundry, was closer to Van Ness all night than the ocean is to the beach, and it looked like the Kid was gonna have a tough time breakin' 'em up.

Along around eleven, Miss Vincent calls Scanlan aside and reminds him that he had better start workin' for G. Herbert, because they would all be beatin' it for the train in a hour. She also give out that, if he didn't make good, she was off him for life. Scanlan bows—another trick he copped from Van Ness—and takes me away down at the end of the lawn to dope somethin' out.

I tripped over what I thought at first was a dead body and me and the Kid props it up in the light.

"Ha, ha!" it says. "Tony he'sa laugha at you! Tony he'sa laugha at everybody! Bomb Germo! thisa fel' tella me—ha, ha, ha!"

The Kid grunts in disgust, lets go and Tony bounces back on the lawn.

"Stewed to the scalp!" says Scanlan. "Frisk him!"

I run my hands over Tony and bring forth a bottle of gin and another one of bourbon. The Kid looks 'em over, finally stickin' 'em both in his coat pocket.

"Come on!" he tells me. "They's no use hangin' around here. If I don't get back there, some of them Wealthy Willies that have been wishin' all night will be one-steppin' with Miss Vincent!"

"But how about G. Herbert?" I says.

"He's got my best wishes!" growls the Kid. "He's a nice little feller, but that's the best I can do. What d'ye think I am—Cupid?"

"Well, gimme the alcohol then!" I says. "You ain't gonna fall off the wagon are you, when—"

"Shut up, Stupid!" he butts in. "I wouldn't take a drink of this stuff for what Rockefeller gets for overtime! I want to get it away from that wop, so's he'll have somethin' to moan about when he wakes up."

We went back to the party, and a couple of dames standin' at the punch bowl calls to the Kid. He always was a riot with the women! Helen Dear is there with Van Ness, and he's got to where he's pattin' her hand, while G. Herbert stands in back of 'em lookin' like he wished he had some nails to bite.

I come to a table and there's Miss Vincent sittin' alone and she motions me to sit down with her—so's my back would hide her from the rest of the bunch. She says a little bit of society went a long ways with her, and where was the Kid? Before I can answer her along comes Helen Dear and she plumps down at the table and starts to tell us what a magnificent man Mister Van Ness was. She claims she never seen such a perfect gentleman in her life. I liked to snickered out loud at the disappointed way she pulled that one and then the Kid, G. Herbert and Van Ness suddenly comes around a tree and joins the party.

Scanlan winks at Miss Vincent, and she looks at him inquiringly, but he just shakes his head. I noticed that G. Herbert looked kinda sad, and he must have put his giggler away because he just sat lookin' down at the ground. Van Ness is full of life—I never seen him so cheerful—so I figured that while them and the Kid was alone, Van Ness must have told 'em that Helen Dear had proposed or accepted him.

Finally, Helen Dear looks at her wrist watch and says she'll have to tear herself away, because the train leaves in fifteen minutes. She wastes five of that throwin' soulful looks at Van Ness and he give back as good as he got. G. Herbert offers to get her wraps, comin' to life long enough to make the request, but Helen Dear gives him a sneerin' look and says there was servants there for that purpose. It was a terrible throwdown, and Van Ness nearly grinned, but G. Herbert gamely tried a giggle that sounded like the squeak of a stepped-on rat.

While Helen Dear is gettin' into a coat that couldn't have cost a nickel under five thousand bucks, the Kid gets up and calls Van Ness and G. Herbert aside. They was gone about five minutes. When they came back, Helen Dear is just puttin' on her hat and suddenly the thing slips out of her hands and slides down over one eye.

Then—excuse me a minute, I'm in convulsions! I'll never forget it if I live to see Bryan vote against prohibition! There's Helen Dear gettin' red in the face and strugglin' with that hat and—

"Ha, ha, ha, ha!" shrieks Van Ness—the guy that had lost his laugher!—"Ha, ha, ha, ha!" he yells, holdin' the chair so's he can stand up and pointin' at Helen's hat. "You ought to go in vaudeville!" he hollers. "You'd be a riot with that act! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Miss Vincent gasps, the Kid grins, and I all but fainted. Here's this guy laughin' his head off for the first time in ten years and—look at the time he picked to do it! Sweet Cookie!

Helen Dear turns eighteen shades of red and fights for her breath like a fish when you drag it over the side of the boat. Then up steps little G. Herbert. His eyes is kinda glassy, but his face is set and hard. His spine is as straight as a flag pole and he sticks a piece of glass over one eye, just like Van Ness used to do! Dignity? Why he could have took Van Ness when that guy was right—and give him lessons!

"What does this mean, sir!" he says, walkin' up to Van Ness who is holdin' his sides and fallin' off the chair. Laugh? That bird was in hysterics!

"Ha, ha, ha!" bellers Van Ness. "Get a couple of good camera men quick! Ha, ha, ha, ha! It looks like she got hit with a pie!"

"You infernal idiot!" roars G. Herbert. "How dare you laugh at this lady?"

"Oh, boy!" answers Van Ness, finally rollin' off his chair. "Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"Come, Herbert!" pipes Helen. "We will go back together and my answer is Yes! Thank Heaven that man stands exposed in his true character!"

"Thas' right!" nods Herbert, waggin' his head and glarin' at all of us. "C'mon—hic—Cmon, M' dear!"

Somethin' comes staggerin' up and grabs the Kid by the arm. It was Tony.

"Aha!" he yells. "Who'sa taka my bottle gin, bottle bourbon? Sapristi! You bigga stiffa, I—"

The Kid gives him a slow straight arm, and Tony goes over the table backwards, landin' right beside his master.

"No spika da Engleesh!" says Scanlan, as Tony disappears.

I grabbed him by the arm.

"Show me them bottles," I says, gettin' wise in a flash.

The Kid takes out two empty non-refillables and tosses 'em in the grass.

"My!" he says, dreamily. "How that little guy went to it!"

Toot! Toot! Toot! goes the Santa Fe flier pullin' out with G. Herbert and Helen Dear.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha—ho, ho, ho, ho!" screams Van Ness from under the table. "She promised—ha, ha, ha! to cheer me up—hic—ha, ha, ha! and she—hic—certainly—ha, ha, ha!—made good!"



CHAPTER VI

THE UNHAPPY MEDIUM

They may be such a thing as a ghost, but I don't believe it! At the same time, I'm willin' to admit that my feelin's in the matter ain't gonna prove the ruin of the haunted house promoters. They's a whole lot of things which I look on as plain and simple bunk, that the average guy studies at college. But the reason I say they may be, is because when me and Kid Scanlan come back East this year we stopped off somewheres in the hurrah for prohibition part of the country and was showed over what the advertisin' matter admitted to be the greatest bakery in the world.

I think them ad writers was modest fellers. That joint was not only the world's greatest bakery, it was the world's greatest anything!

I never really knowed a thing about bread, except that you put butter on it, until I give that place the up and down.

What I don't know about the staff of life now would never get you through Yale. I might go farther than that and come right out with the fact that I have become a abandoned bread fiend and got to have it or I foam at the mouth, since I seen how it was made at this dough foundry.

A accommodatin' little guy took hold of me and the Kid and showed us all over the different machine shops where this here bread was mixed, baked and what-notted for the trade. Our charmin' guide must have come from a family of auctioneers and circus barkers and he never heard of no sums under ten or eleven thousand in his life. He knowed more about figures than Joe Grady, who once filled in a summer with a Russian ballet, and he had been wound up and set to deliver chatter at the rate of three words a second, provided the track was fast and he got off in front. He talked with his whole body, waggin' his head, movin' his arms and shufflin' his feet. When he got warmed up and goin' good, he pushed forward at you with his hands like he was tryin' to insert his chatter right into you.

He leads us to a spot about half a mile from where we come in, holds up his hands to Heaven, coughs, blows his nose and gives a little shiver.

"Over there!" he bellers, without no warnin'. "Over there is our marvelous, mastadon, mixin' shop. We use 284,651 pounds of scrupulously sifted and freshly flavored flour, one million cakes of elegant yeast and 156,390 pounds of bakin' powder each and every year! We employ 865 magnificent men there and they get munificent money. We don't permit the use of drugs, alcoholics, tobacco or unions! The men works eight easy hours a delightful day, six days a week and they are happy, hardy and healthy! Promotion is regular, rapid and regardless! Our employees is all loyal, likable and Lithuanians! They own their own cottages, clothes and chickens, bein' thrifty, temperate and—"

"Tasty!" I yells. I couldn't, keep it in no longer!

"What?" snaps the little guy, kinda sore.

"Lay off, Stupid!" says the Kid to me, with a openly admirin' glance at the runt. "Go on with your story," he nods to him. "Never mind Senseless, here, I'm gettin' every word of it!"

The little hick glares at me and points to a shack on the left.

"Over there," he pipes. "Over there is our shippin' plant where the freshly finished and amazingly appetizin' loaves are carefully counted and accurately assembled! For this painstakin' performance we employ 523 more men. None but the skilled, superior and—and—eh—Scandinavian are allowed in that diligent department, and each and every day a grand, glorious total of ten thousand lovely loaves is let loose with nothin' missin' but the consumer's contented cackle as he eagerly eats! We even garnish each loaf with a generous gob of Gazoopis—our own ingenuous invention—before they finally flitter forth! Would you like to see the shop?"

"I certainly wish I could sling chatter like that!" answers the Kid with a sigh. "But I guess it's all in the way a guy was brung up. Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" he mutters, turnin' the words over in his mouth like they was sweet morsels. "Gobs of generous Gazoopis! Oh, boy!"

The little guy throws out his chest and bows with a "I-thank-you" look all over his face. He got me sore just watchin' him. Y'know that runt hated himself!

"Say!" I says to him. "If all that stuff you claim for this roll foundry is on the level, it must take a lot of dough to run it, eh?"

"Are you tryin' to kid me?" he sneers.

"No!" I comes back. "But speakin' of bakeries, I'd sacrifice my sacred silk socks for a flash at them skilled Scandinavians assemblin' that bread, before I move on to nasty New York!"

The Kid slaps me on the back and grins.

"Go on, Foolish!" he says. "You got this bird on the ropes!" He turns to the runt. "All I want," he goes on, "is one peep at them likable Lithuanians—can I git that?"

"You guys is as funny as pneumonia to me!" snorts the little guy, gettin' red in the face. "That stuff may pass for comedy in Yonkers or wherever you hicks blowed in from, but it don't git no laugh outa me! D'ye wanna see this shop or don't you—yes or no?"

"Let's go!" I tells him. "You got me all worked up about it!"

"Same here!" says the Kid. "I only wish I could talk like you can, but I guess it's a gift, ain't it?"

The little guy grunts somethin' and nods for us to fall in behind him, and we lock step along till we come to another joint from which was issuin' what I'll lay eight to five was all the noise in the world. How they ever gathered it up and got it in the buildin' I don't know, but I do know it was there! If you'd take a bowlin' alley on Turnverein night, a boiler factory workin' on a rush order and the battle of Gettysburg, wind 'em up and set 'em all off at once, you might get a faint idea of how the inmates of that buildin' was ruinin' the peace and quiet of the surroundin' country. A dynamite explosion in the next block would have attracted as much attention as a whisper in a steamfittin' shop.

"I thought the war was all over!" hollers the Kid, holdin' his ears. "Has the police been tipped off about this?"

"What d'ye mean the police?" screams back the runt. "That there is the mixin' and bakin' shop."

"Yeh?" I cuts in. "Well, I don't know what them skilled Scandinavians of yours is at, but, believe me, they're tryin' all right!"

The runt sneers at us.

"You must be a fine pair of hicks!" he says. "D'ye mean to say you never heard of the Eureka Mixin' and Bakin' machine?"

"I can hear it now, all right!" I tells him, noddin' to the buildin' where the boilermakers was havin' a field day, "but—"

"Sufferin' salmon, what boobs!" he interrupts me. Then he gives us both the once over and starts his sneerer workin' again. "Say!" he asks me. "Who d'ye like to win the battle of Santiago and d'ye think Lincoln will git elected again?"

"I don't know," I comes back. "I'm gonna vote for Jefferson myself!" I looks him right in the eye. "I think Washington is a sucker to hang around Valley Forge all winter, don't you?" I asks him.

"Couple of small time cut-ups, eh?" he says, shakin' his head. "Where d'ye come from?"

"New York," the Kid tells him, "and listen—will you do me a favor and let's hear some more about them likable Lithuanians and gobs of generous Gazoopis?"

"I figured you come from some hick burg like New York," says the runt, ignorin' the Kid's request. "I can spot a guy from New York ten miles away! He knocks Brooklyn, thinks walkin' up Broadway is seein' life, was born in Memphis and is the only thing that keeps the mail order houses in Oshkosh from goin' to the wall! New Yorkers, eh?" he winds up with another insultin' sneer. "I got you!"

"Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" mutters the Kid like he's in a trance. "Sweet Papa!"

The runt looks at him.

"How does that bird fool the almshouse?" he asks me.

I bent down so's I could whisper in the side of his little dome. Them skilled Scandinavians in the buildin' had gone crazy or else some of the night shift had come in with more boilers and things to hit 'em with.

"That's Kid Scanlan, welterweight champion of the world!" I hisses in his ear.

"Ha, ha!" laughs the runt. "That's who he'd like to be, you mean!"

"Our employees is all hale, hearty and hilarious!" grins the Kid at him. "We pay 'em off in money, music and mush! Wow!"

"If that big stiff is tryin' to kid me," begins the runt, gettin' red again, "he—"

"All right, all right!" I butts in quickly. "Don't let's have no violence. Show us what makes that shop go, and we'll grab the next rattler for New York. Y'know the Kid fights Battlin' Edwards on the twenty-first and—"

"Are you on the level with that stuff?" interrupts the runt, still lookin' at the Kid. "Is that really Kid Scanlan?"

I calls the Kid over.

"Kid," I says, "meet Mister—er—"

"Sapp," says the runt. "Joe Sapp!" He sticks out his hand. "I remember you now," he tells the Kid. "I seen you fight some tramp in Fort Wayne last year. I think you hit this guy with everything but the referee and that's why I like your work. When I send in three bucks for a place to sit down at a box fight, I expect to see assault and batter and not the Virginia Reel! Why—"

"Not to give you a short answer," I butts in, "but how about the insane asylum over there?" I points to the buildin'. "Do we see that or don't we?"

Right away he straightens up and sticks his finger at it.

"It takes exactly twelve, temptin' minutes to completely compose and accurately assemble a loaf!" he shouts. "We never heard of waste, and efficiency was born in this factory. The only thing that loafs here is the bread! Each eager employee has his own particular part to perform and that accounts for the amazin' and awesome accuracy with which we bake the beautiful bread. Step this way!"

"Believe me!" says the Kid, "I wish I had a line of patter like that! 'Amazin' and awesome accuracy'!" he repeats. "Do you get that?"

Right then about a dozen dames and their consorts come breezin' in the main entrance. Offhand, they look like the hicks that gives the "Seein' New York" busses a play, and when the runt spots them he ducks and grabs my arm.

"C'mon!" he says. "Shake it up! If them boobs see me, I'll have to show 'em all over the plant! That's a gang of them Snooks' Tourists, seein' the world for fourteen eighty-five a-piece, breakfast at hotel on third mornin' out and bus from train included! Most of them is wisenheimers from Succotash Crossin', Mo.; and they're out to see that they don't get cheated. They're gonna see everything like it says on the ticket, and some of 'em is ready to sue Snooks because they got somethin' in their eye from lookin' out the train window and missed eight telegraph poles and a water tank on account of it. The rest of them sits around knockin' everything on general principles and claimin' the thing is a fake. Then there'll be one old guy in the party with a trick horn he holds to his ear, and, when I get all through tellin' 'em about the mixin' shop, the deef guy will say, 'Hey? What was that about the airship again?' There will also be three veteran school-teachers which will want samples of the bread and hide out a couple of rolls on the side. And then one young married couple which started sayin' 'Wonderful!' when the train pulled out of the old home town and which has said nothin' else but that since! No, sir! I'm off them tourists—c'mon, sneak around here!"

He boldly walks into the buildin' where all the noise is comin' from, and not wantin' to act yellah before strangers we followed him in. They was a lot of things in there and if you ever make the town, Joe Sapp will show 'em to you. He has to, in order to eat. But the only thing I remember was the way them lovely, luxurious loaves was artistically assembled, and I'll remember that little item till the insurance company pays off!

They was a great, big machine in the middle of the floor and that was the thing that was makin' the bread and noise. A half dozen of them skilled Scandinavians stood away up on a gallery at one end and their job was of a pourin' nature. They was all dressed in white and wore little trick hats on which it said this, "No Human Hands Touch It." I didn't know whether it meant the skilled Scandinavians or the beautiful bread.

"The most marvelous, magnificent, mammoth invention of the age!" bawls the runt so's we could hear him over the noise. "Here is where the beautiful bread is blissfully baked by the wonderful workmen! This machine cost the sensational sum of half a million dollars, and its capacity is a trifle over five hundred finely finished luscious loaves each and every—"

That's all I heard because I went in a trance from watchin' the thing. I never seen nothin' like it before and I know darn well I never will again. Listen! Them skilled Scandinavians poured in raw wheat at one end of this here machine, and it come out the other end, steamin' hot bread! Some machine, eh? Not only that, but when it come out, it was baked, labelled, wrapped in oil paper and smellin' most heavenly from that generous gob of Gazoopis, as the runt said.

I dragged the Kid outside and we started for the railroad station without comment. As we passed out the door, we heard the runt screamin', probably thinkin' we was still there.

"One section reduces the wheat to flour, another mixes the dough, it passes on to the steam ovens and then what happens? Bread! Over here—"

The Kid stops all of a sudden, takes a hitch in his belt and looks back at the shop.

"Hell!" he says. "They can't make no bread like that!"

"You seen 'em do it, didn't you?" I asks him, although I was thinkin' the same thing myself.

"Even at that," he comes back, "I don't believe it!"

We walks on a little ways, and the Kid stops again.

"I certainly wish I could talk like that little runt!" he shoots out. "Take it from me, that bird is there forty ways. He's got Webster lookin' like a dummy!"

He keeps on mutterin' to himself as we breeze up to the station, and, when I lean over to get an earful I hear him sayin', "They're all simple, sassy and suckers! We feed 'em oranges, oatmeal and olives!"

So, as I said before, they may be such a thing as ghosts. After watchin' that bread bakin' machine at play I'll go further than that. There may be anything!

One day at the trainin' camp, a couple of weeks after we hit New York, a handler comes to me and says they's two guys outside that wants to see the Kid. I hopped out to take a flash at 'em, but the Kid has been reached, and when I come on the scene he's shakin' hands with 'em. One of these guys was dressed the way the public thinks bookmakers and con men doll up and he wore one of them sweet, trustin' innocent faces like you see on the villain in a dime novel. He looked to me like he'd steal a sunflower seed from a blind parrot.

But it was the other guy that was the riot to me.

He was tall and lanky, dressed all in black like the pallbearer the undertaker furnishes, and the saddest-lookin' boob I ever seen in my life! If he wasn't the original old Kid Kill-Joy, he was the bird that rehearsed him, believe me! Y'know just from lookin' at this guy, a man would get to thinkin' about his past life, the time he throwed the baby down the well when but a playful child, how old his parents was gettin' and the time Shorty Ellison run off with the red-headed dame that lived over the butcher's. You wished you had saved your money or somebody else's, suddenly findin' out that it was a tough world where a poor man didn't have a Chinaman's chance, and you wondered if death by drownin' was painful or not.

That's the way it made you feel when you just looked at this guy. Ever see one of 'em?

He had a trick of sighin'. Not just ordinary heaves, but deep, dark and gloomy sighs that took all the life out of whoever he sighed at. If they had that bird over in Europe, they never would have been no war, because when he started sighin', nobody would have had enough ambition left to fight. Every time he opened his mouth I thought he was gonna say, "Merciful Heaven help us all!" or somethin' like that. But he didn't. He just sighed.

The Kid tells me the riot of color was Honest Dan Leduc, and that he was the best behaved guy that ever spent a week end in Sing Sing, where he had gone every now and then to study jail conditions at the request of thirteen men, the same bein' a judge and a jury. The sad-lookin' boob was Professor Pietro Parducci, the well known medium.

"Medium what?" I says, when the Kid pulls that one.

The Kid frowns at me and turns to his new found friends.

"Don't mind Foolish here," he tells 'em, "he's got the idea that everything is crooked. He thinks the war was a frame-up for the movies, and the Kaiser got double-crossed, but he ain't a bad guy at that. He knows more about makin' money than a lathe hand at the mint." He jerks his thumb at Honest Dan and swings around on me. "This guy and me was brung up together," he explains, "and before I went into the fight game we was as close as ninety-nine and a hundred. He's been all over the world since then, he says so himself, but just now he's up against it. It seems he was runnin' a pool room on Twenty-Eighth Street and he give the wrong winner of the Kentucky Derby to the precinct captain. The next mornin' the captain give every cop in the station house a axe and Dan's address. His friend here is a now, whosthis and—"

Honest Dan pulls what I bet he thought was a pleasant smile. It reminded me more of a laughin' hyena.

"One minute!" he butts in. "My friend, the world-renowed Professor Parducci, is a medium, a mystic and a swami. He's the seventh son of a seventh son, born with a veil and spent two years in Indiana with the yogi. He can peer into the future or gaze back at the past. He is in direct communication with the spirits of the dear departed and as a crystal gazer and palmist he stands alone!"

"That's a great line of patter, Dan," says the Kid, "but we met a guy on the trip back that had the English language layin' down and rollin' over when he snapped his fingers. Generous gobs of Gazoopis and likable, loyal Lithuanians! Can you tie that?"

I was still lookin' over the gloomy guy with the name that sounded like a brand of olive oil, and I decided he was the bunk. I asked him could he tell my fortune, and he draws himself up and claims he's not in harmony just now. That was the tip-off to me, and I figures he has come out to take the Kid for his bankroll. I knowed he couldn't tell no fortunes the minute I seen him. He didn't look to me as if he could tell his own name, and I bet all the spirits he ever communicated with was called private stock. The end of his nose was as red as a four alarm fire and the back of his collar was all wore off from where he had kept throwin' back his head so's the saloon keepers could meet expenses. Honest Dan said he couldn't speak much English, so I guess he had stopped at "I'll have the same" and "Here's a go!"

Well, I had the right dope, because the next week the Kid goes down to the bank and draws out five thousand bucks to set Honest Dan and the professor up in business with. They was gonna open a swell fortune-tellin' joint on Fifth Avenue. I said the thing sounded crooked to me, and the Kid got sore and told me Honest Dan couldn't do nothin' like that, it wasn't in him. He showed me where Dan had always got time off for good conduct, no matter what jail he was in.

The professor brightens up for a minute when the Kid hands over the roll, but after that he went right back into the gloom again.

Honest Dan gives the Kid a receipt for the sucker money and him and his trick medium goes on their way. After a while, I forgot about 'em. The Kid fights Edwards and a couple of more tramps and knocks 'em all kickin' and we're just gonna grab one of them "See America Firsts" for the coast when some club promoter goes crazy and offers us ten thousand iron men to fight Joe Ryan. The Kid would have fought the Marines for half of that, so we run all the way to the club and signed articles whiles the guy that hung up the purse was still wishin' he had stayed on the wagon.

The Kid had got Professor Parducci to fix him up with a few love charms and owls' ears by which he was gonna make himself solid with Miss Vincent. In fact Scanlan fell so hard for the medium stuff that when the professor told him to get at all cost a lock of Miss Vincent's hair clipped at eighteen minutes after eleven on a rainy Sunday night, he writes out to her and asks her to send him a lock cut just that way!

When he wasn't pesterin' the professor on how to win the movie queen, he was goin' around mutterin', "Loyal, likeable Lithuanians and generous gobs of Gazoopis!" until the newspaper guys wrote that Kid Scanlan would be a mark for the first good boy he fought, because like everybody else that was a sudden success, he had took to usin' stimulants which is only sold on a doctor's prescription. On the level, he'd git a wad of paper and sit around all night with a dictionary, writin' down all the words that begin with the same letter and then he'd git up and repeat that stuff for a hour.

One afternoon we went downtown to look over this joint run by Honest Dan and the professor. It was in one of them studio buildings on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-Eighth Street, and the rent they was payin' for it would have kept the army in rubber heels for six years. They's a long line of autos outside and the inmates was streamin' in and out of the place like a crowd goin' to see the beloved rector laid out. Some of the dames would be familiar to you, if you've been readin' the box scores in the latest divorce melees, or the lineup of the committee for the aid of the Esquimaux victims of the war.

We get in a elevator, and, floatin' up to the roof, walk down what would have been a fire trap on the East Side, and here we are at Professor Parducci's Temple of the Inner Star. A couple of West Indian hall boys, who's gag line was "Say-hib," lets us in. They was dressed in sheets and had towels twisted around their heads and smelled strongly of gin. Pretty soon Honest Dan comes out and shakes hands all around. Except for his face, you'd never know it was the same guy. His hair is brushed all the way back like the guys that poses for the underwear ads and he's dressed in a black suit that fit him better than most of his skin. In his shirt front they's a diamond that looked like a young arc light, and he had enough gems on his hands to make J. P. Morgan gnash his teeth.

He told me that him and the professor wasn't doin' no more business than a guy would do in Hades with the ice water concession, and that Barnum was wrong when he said they was a sucker born every minute. Honest Dan said his figures showed there was about two born every second.

He leads us into a great big hall that was filled with statues, pictures, rugs, sofas, women and fatheads. The furnishings of this joint would make Buckingham Palace look like a stable. It must have ruined the Kid's five thousand just to lay in scenery for that one room alone. The statues and pictures was nearly all devoted to one subject, and that was why should people wear clothes—especially women? The victims is all lollin' around on them plush sofas, drinkin' tea and lookin' like a ten-year-old kid at church or a guy waitin' in the doctor's office to find out if he's got consumption or chilblains. It was as quiet as a Sunday in Philadelphia and they was also a very strong smell of burnin' glue, which Honest Dan said was sacred incense that always had to be used by the professor before he could work.

Among the decorations was a very large dame sittin' over in a corner dressed within a inch of her life. I suppose she had ears, a neck and hands, but you couldn't tell right away whether she had or not, because them parts of her anatomy, as the feller says, was buried under a carload of diamonds. You could see by her face that at one time she had probably been a swell-lookin' dame, but them days was all over. Still, she was makin' a game try at comin' back, and from her complexion she must have been kept busy day and night openin' bottles and cans signed on the outside by Lillian Russell and etc.

This dame was havin' the best time of anybody in the joint. She was sittin' up very straight and solemn with both chins restin' in her glitterin' hands and from the look in her eyes some Sunday paper had just claimed she was the best lookin' woman in America and the like.

A guy wouldn't have to be no Sherlock Holmes to see that this was the bird that was bein' readied for the big killin' by Honest Dan and his trick professor. The rest of them was just what you might call the chorus.

Sittin' right beside the stout party was a kid that had just dropped in from the cover of a magazine. She was the kind of female that could come down to breakfast with the mumps and her hair in curl papers, fry the egg on the wrong side and yet make the lucky guy across the table go out whistlin' and pityin' his unwed friends. You know how them dames look when they have give some time to dollin' up, don't you? Well, this one had everything; take it from me, she was a knockout! She's tappin' the floor with a classy little foot and tryin' to see can she pull a silk handkerchief apart with her bare hands, the while registerin' this, "This-medium-thing-is-the-bunk-and-I-wish-I-was-out-of-here!"

I doped her as the stout dame's daughter, hittin' .1000 on the guess as I found out later.

"Well," whispers Honest Dan to the Kid, "what d'ye think of the place?"

"Some joint!" says the Kid. "Listen—I got a new one. The most magnificently, male mauler on earth! How's that—poor, eh?"

"What does it mean?" asks Honest Dan.

"It means me, Stupid!" pipes the Kid. "I'm havin' some cards made up with that on it. The sagacious, sanguine and scandalous Scanlan, welterweight walloper of the world! Where's the professor?"

"Sssh!" whispers Honest Dan. "Lay off that professor gag here. That's small town stuff—he's a mahatma now! He's in one of his silences, but if you keep quiet I'll take you around and show you how he works."

He takes us through a little door that leads into a dark room which was a steal on the old chamber of horrors at the Eden Musee. It was full of ghost pictures drawed by artists who had no use for prohibition, and they was plenty of skulls and stuff like that layin' around where they would do the most good. At the far end is a small wire gratin' with a Morris chair on the other side of it. Honest Dan explains that that's where the come-ons sit while the professor massages their soul. They never see him, Dan figurin' in that way it would be harder to pick the professor out at police headquarters when the district attorney got around to him. We hadn't been there a minute, when the curtain at the other end of the room opens and in blows the stout dame, floppin' down in the chair with a sigh as the professor pulls open the grate to feed her the oil. Dan pulls us back in the dark, and I notice she was so excited that she shook all over like a ten cent portion of cornstarch or Instant Desserto and her breath was comin' in short little gasps.

Honest Dan is takin' a inventory of the couple of quarts of diamonds she wore and figurin' the list price on his shirt cuffs. When he got through, he dug me in the ribs and says it looks like a big winter.

The professor starts to talk with a strong Ellis Island dialect, tellin' the dame that he's just been in a trance, give the sacred crystal the once over and took up her case with a few odd ghosts. The result was that a spirit which was in the know had just give him a tip that she was no less than the tenth regular reincarnation of Cleopatra, who did a big time act in one with a guy called Marc Anthony which was now doin' a single or had jumped to the movies or somethin' like that.

The stout dame gets up off the chair and waves her handkerchief.

"Merciful Heavens!" she remarks loudly. "I knew it!"

Then she pulls a funny fall and faints!

The professor hisses at Dan to get him a cigarette, and the West Indian hall boys drag the stout dame into the chair from which she had slipped followin' the professor's sure-fire stuff about Cleopatra. He snatches a few drags out of the cigarette before the dame comes to and when she does, he goes on and says yes she is Cleopatra, they ain't no doubt about that part of it and she must have noticed the strange power she had over men all her life, hadn't she? The stout dame sighs and nods her head. The professor then tells her that she has been in wrong and unhappy all her life, because she had never met her mate. The same bein' a big, husky, red-blooded cave man which would club her senseless and carry her off to his lair. Had she ever met anybody like that? The stout dame says not lately, but when poor Henry and her had first got wed he was a Saturday night ale-hound and once or twice he had—but never mind, she won't speak ill of the dead. The professor says he can see that nobody of the real big-league calibre has crossed her path as yet and that her husband's spirit had told him in confidence only the other day that one night he got to thinkin' what a poor worm he was to be married to Cleopatra, and it had been too much for his humble soul which bust.

The dame nods and starts to weep.

"Poor Hennerey!" she says. "He ain't stopped lyin' yet. I should never have wed him, but how did I know that my fatal beauty would prove his undoing?"

"Ain't that rich?" pipes Honest Dan in my ear.

The professor has a coughin' spell, and when he calmed himself, he says he has just got in touch with Marc Anthony and he's pullin' the wires to have him come back to earth so's their souls can be welded together again and if she will come back in a week, he'll be able to tell her some big news. He said it was bein' whispered around among the spirits that Marc Anthony was on earth now, eatin' his noble heart out because he couldn't find her.

Then he suddenly shuts the gate, and the dame staggers out, overcome with joy and the smell of that incense which would have made a glue factory quit. Honest Dan beats it around and opens the door for her. They wouldn't take a nickel off her then, because they was savin' her for the big play.

About a week after our visit to the Temple of the Inner Star, the Kid comes runnin' up to my room at the hotel one mornin' and busts in the door. He's got a newspaper in his hand and he slams it down on the bed and kicks a innocent chair over on its side.

"I hope they give him eighty years!" he hollers.

"Who's your friend?" I asks him.

"Friend!" he screams. "Why, the big psalm-singin' stiff, I'll murder him!"

"They's just one thing I'd like to know, Kid," I says. "Who?"

"That cheap, pan-handlin' crook that Dan Leduc wished on me!" he yells. "That rotten snake I kept from dyin' in the gutter, that baby-stealin' rat which claims he's a medium! Professor Bunko—that's who!"

I grabbed up the paper and all over the front page is a picture of Miss Vincent. Underneath it says this,

"Famous Film Star Rumored Engaged to Millionaire."

"Well," I says, "what has this here social note got to do with the Professor?"

"What has a jockey got to do with horse-racin'?" bellers the Kid. "Why the big hick, I'll go down there and strangle him right out loud before them high-brow simps of his! I'll have him pinched and I hope he gets life! I'll—"

He went on like that for half an hour, and when he finally cools off he explains that the professor had guaranteed to dust off his charmers and charm Miss Vincent so hard that she wouldn't even give a pleasant smile to nobody but the Kid. All Scanlan had to do was follow the professor's dope and they'd be nothin' to it but slippin' the minister and payin' the railroad people for the honeymoon. The Kid had gone ahead and done like the professor said, startin' off with the letter requestin' a lock of her hair clipped at eleven eighteen on a rainy Sunday night. Then he telegraphed her to bathe her thumbs in hot oolong tea every Friday at noon and send him the leaves in a red envelope. He followed that up with a note demandin' a ring that she had first dipped in the juice of a stewed poppy, and then held in back of her while she said, "Alagazza, gazzopi, gazzami" thirteen times.

I guess the professor overplayed the thing a bit, because the only action the Kid got was a short note from Miss Vincent in which she said that as long as he had started right in to drink the minute he hit New York, their friendship was all over. The next thing was that notice in the paper.

The Kid's idea was to go right down and wreck the Temple of the Inner Star, windin' up by havin' Honest Dan and his bunk medium pinched. I showed him where it would do no good, because he had set 'em up in business and if they was crooked the jury would figure that and put the Kid's name on one of them indictments. He calmed off finally and said he'd be satisfied to let it go at half killin' 'em both and makin' a bum out of the Temple of the Inner Star.

We got down there in a few minutes, and Honest Dan meets us at the door. He's all excited and says the time has come for the big hog killin', after which they're gonna blow New York, because they been tipped off that the new police commissioner is about to startle the natives with a raid. The Kid starts to bawl him out, when the big stout dame is ushered into the room and Dan hustles us into the professor's shrine in the rear.

As soon as she gets inside, the professor tells her to prepare for a shock. She shivers all over, grabbin' the side of the chair and takin' a long whiff out of a little green bottle. Then she says she'll try and be brave, and to let her have the works. The professor says he has finally dug up Marc Anthony, and all the spirits is in there tryin' for them, so's they can be brought together. He told her to go right back to her rooms at the Fitz-Charlton and he would send out the old thought waves for Marc. Just when he'd get him, he didn't know—it might be a day, a week or a month, but she was to sit there all dolled up to receive him and wait. He said she would know Marc, because he would have a snake tattooed on the third finger of his right hand in memory of the way Cleopatra kissed off. That's all he was allowed to give out just now, he winds up.

Well, the stout dame thanks him about six hundred times and waddles out darn near hysterical. She grabs hold of her daughter and hisses in her ear,

"Oh, Gladys, they've found him! My beloved Marc Anthony is coming to claim me for his own. Then we will return to Egypt, and, sitting upon a golden throne—"

Friend daughter pulls a weary smile and leads Cleopatra to the door.

"Oh, don't, mother!" she says. "Don't! If you only knew how all this sickens me! This man has hypnotized you! Why don't you listen to me and take that trip to California where—"

"What!" squeals the stout dame. "What? Be away when my Marc comes? How dare you think of such a thing! I did that once and if you have read your ancient history, you must remember the terrible result!"

Daughter sighs, shakes her head and they go out.

Now the Kid has been takin' all this stuff in without lettin' a peep out of him and when the stout dame has left, I figured he'd tear right in to the plotters, so I got ready to hold up my end and reached for a chair. But what d'ye think the Kid did? He falls down on a sofa and starts to laugh! On the level, I bet he snickered out loud for a good fifteen minutes and then he gets up and walks to the door without sayin' a single word to either Dan or the professor, after all that stuff he pulled on me at the hotel!

While we're goin' down in the elevator, Honest Dan tells us that they got a handsome actor who just now is playin' in a show called "Standin' on the Corners, Waitin' for a Job," and they're gonna have him get a snake painted on the third finger of his right hand and shoo him up to the stout dame the next day. After he has been welcome homed, Marc Anthony is gonna say that he's makin' out a check for the professor which throwed them together, and don't she think she ought to send in somethin' also? When she asks what he thinks would be about right, Marc Anthony is gonna say that he guesses she ought to keep the pen she wrote the check with as a souvenir, but that everything else she had, includin' anything a pawnbroker would give a ticket on, would do!

I didn't say nothin' to that, but I was doin' a piece of thinkin' and as soon as we got our feet on Fifth Avenue again, I let go. I told the Kid what I thought of his friend Honest Dan in language that Billy Sunday could have been proud of. When I got through with Dan, I took up the professor and give him a play. I said it was my belief that a couple of safety-first crooks, who would deliberate trim a simple old stout dame out of her dough in that coarse manner, should be taken up to the Metropolitan tower and eased off.

The Kid just grins and starts hummin' under his breath.

By this time I had worked myself up to such a pitch that my goat was chasin' madly about the streets, and to have the Kid act that way was about all I needed. I carefully explained to him just how many kinds of a big, yellah tramp he was, to let the professor crab him with Miss Vincent and get away with it clean. I showed him where he should have at least bent a chair over that guy's head, if he was a real gentleman whose honor had been trifled with and not a four flushin' false alarm.

"Gobs of generous Gazoopis!" he snickers at me when I get through. "Our employees is all new, noisy and Norwegians!"

They was a queer look in his eye, and I figured he must have slipped out in the mornin' at that and dug up a place where prohibition hadn't carried. I stopped right in the middle of the traffic and told him I was goin' up to the Fritz-Charlton the next mornin' and tip the stout dame off, if it was the last thing I did.

He just grins!

The next mornin' I beat it up to Cleopatra's hotel, and, after I have waited an hour, she sends a maid down to see me. The maid tells me to spread my hands out flat on a little table that's standin' there and she examines every finger like a sure enough mechanic looks over a second-hand automobile he's gonna buy to hack with. Finally, she throws my hands down with a disappointed look and her shoulders begins one of them hula dances.

"Viola!" she remarks. "That leetle snake, he is not there! Madame she is not at home—away wit' you!"

Well, I figures I did what I could, so I breezed out and left Cleopatra flat.

Failin' to locate the Kid anywheres, I went on down to the studio and walk right in on the professor and Honest Dan givin' Marc Anthony a dress rehearsal. He was a handsome guy, all right, sickenin'ly so, with one of them soft, mushy faces and wavin' blonde hair. He's had the snake tattooed on his finger, like the part called for, and the way he carries on about how he's gonna give the stout dame the work makes me foam at the mouth. My once favorably known left had all it could do to keep from bouncin' off his chin! Finally, they start him away and Honest Dan tells me how they got it framed up for him to meet Cleopatra. He was to go to the Fritz-Charlton and send up a card that claimed he was the editor of "Society Seethings," and when she comes down to see him, he was to ask her what was her plans for the winter season and a lot of bunk like that. In no way was he to make a crack about bein' Marc Anthony—that would be too raw, but as he was leavin' he was to carelessly let her see that snake on his finger. That was all!

They knowed Cleopatra would do the rest.

I couldn't stand no more, so I hustled back to our hotel, and the minute I get in, the clerk tells me the Kid has been chasin' around lookin' for me all morning so I beat it right up to our suite. The Kid is doin' his road work by canterin' around the room when I come in, and he rushes over and grabs me by the arm.

"When are them yeggmen gonna send Marc Anthony up to Cleopatra?" he demands, all excited.

"He just left a few minutes ago!" I tells him. "Why?"

The Kid gives a yell and jumps over to the door leadin' to our sittin'-room, yankin' it open with one jerk. I thought I'd pass away when I got a flash at what was inside. They was about twenty of the roughest lookin' guys I ever seen in my life, all dolled up in new suits, shoes and hats. Some of them I recognized as ex-heavy-weights, they was a few strikin' longshoremen, a fair sprinklin' of East Side gunmen and here and there what had passed for a actor in the tanks.

"Some layout, eh?" pipes the Kid, rubbin' his hands together. "It took me all mornin' and nearly three hundred bucks to rib them guys up, but they're all desperate, darin' and dolled up!"

"What the—what's the big idea?" I gasps.

"Hold up your hands!" roars the Kid at his rough and readys.

They did—and I got it!

Each and every one of them guys had a snake tattooed on the third finger of his right hand!

The Kid had probably put in the mornin' rehearsin' 'em, because all he had to say now was, "Go to it!" and they beat it. He told me they was all goin' up to the Fritz-Charlton and ask for the stout dame at three minute intervals, show their right hand and claim they was Marc Anthony!

"If that don't show the stout dame that the professor is the bunk and if she don't let out a moan that'll be plainly heard at police headquarters, I'll make Dan a present of the five thousand he took me for!" says the Kid.

In about a hour the telephone begins to ring and I answers it. When the ravin' maniac on the other end of the wire got to where he could control the English language, I found out it was no less than Honest Dan. The main thing he said was for us to come down to the Temple of the Inner Star right away, because him and the professor has got in a terrible jam. We hopped in a taxi and did like he said. Honest Dan is waitin' in the elevator for us, and he looked like the loser in a battle royal. He says the stout dame has just left, and she's in a terrible state. I could believe that easy, because they is nothin' more vicious in the land of the free than a enraged come-on. I'd rather face a nervous wildcat than face a angry boob!

"Somebody put the bee on us!" howls Honest Dan, wringin' his hands. "And a truckload of guys went up to the hotel claimin' they was Marc Anthony in voices that disturbed people in China. They throwed the real Marc out on his lily white ear, and seven of 'em got pinched for disorderly conduct. I understand they was a melee up there that would make a football game look like chess and the papers is havin' a field day with the thing! We got to grab Cleopatra's gems and go away from here before the whole plant is uncovered."

"Why," I says, "how are you gonna take the stout dame now? She knows it's a fake, don't she?"

"Fake, hell!" hollers Dan. "She thinks it's on the level! The only thing that bothers her is which one is the right Marc Anthony. She says two of them had such patrician faces that she thinks some of the Caesars has got mixed up with the lot. She's gonna put it up to her late husband, and she's comin' back here any minute to talk with his spirit!" He begins walkin' the floor. "I never seen no dame like that!" he busts out. "She wants to be trimmed! The only thing she seemed to be sore about was the fact that she couldn't pick out the right Marc Anthony. Now we git the chance of a lifetime to grab a roll when she comes back and we ain't got no ghost! If I could only get the guy that sent all them Marc Anthonys up there," he winds up with a yell, "I'd make a ghost out of him!"

He never seemed to think the Kid might have done it, because the Kid was the boy that had set him and the professor up in business and why should he crab his own play?

A little electric buzzer makes good while Honest Dan is ravin' away, and Dan, gettin' white, grabs the Kid by the arm and begs him to come to the rescue.

"Jump in that cabinet there!" he whispers to him. "And when this dame asks if you're Henry, say yes, and tell her the real Marc Anthony is the guy with the blonde hair, and he's now at the City Hospital. That's all you got to say and—"

He shoves the Kid back of the cabinet and me back of a curtain just as Cleopatra blows in with her daughter. Honest Dan tells them to be seated quick, because the professor has just got the spirit of her husband where he's ready to talk to the reporters. The West Indian hall boys sneak around in the back, rattlin' chains and bangin' on pans. Then Dan reaches back and opens the mechanical bellows, and a blast of cold air comes into the room while a white light flashes over the cabinet.

"Now!" whispers Dan to the stout dame, "speak quick!"

At that minute, Dan looked like a guy with a ticket on a hundred to one shot, watchin' it breeze into the stretch leadin' by by a city block.

"Is—is that you Henery?" squeaks Cleopatra in a tremblin' voice.

They's a rustle in the cabinet and then this comes out over the top.

"Generous gobs of Gazoopis! Our employees is ready, reckless and Russian. This guy is crooked, crazy and careless. He will take you for your beautiful, bulgin' bankroll and—"

"Why, Henery!" squawks the dame, jumpin' up off the chair.

I heard the well known dull thud on the other side of the cabinet, and I guess it was Professor Parducci fallin' senseless on the floor. I thought Honest Dan had dropped dead from the way he was hung over a sofa.

"Each and every day," goes on the voice in the cabinet, "each and every day we ship a million lovely loaves—"

"Merciful Heavens!" yells the dame. "A sign! Henery, shall I go back?"

"Back is right!" says the voice. "These guys is cheap crooks and they ain't no Marc Anthony!"

The lights go out and Honest Dan comes to, rushin' over to the stout dame with a million alibis tryin' to be first out of his mouth. I beat it around to the back, but the professor has gone somewheres else while the goin' was fair to medium.

"You have deceived me, you wretch!" screams the stout dame. "You have—"

That's as far as she got, because right in the middle of it she pulls a faint, and daughter eases her to the floor. The Kid hops out of the cabinet and grabs Honest Dan.

"Beat it, you rat," bawls Scanlan, "before I commit mayhem!"

From the way Honest Dan went out of that room, he must have passed Samoa, the first hour!

Daughter reaches up and grabs the Kid's hand.

"I—I—want to thank you," she says, "for saving my mother. I—I don't know what might have happened, if you hadn't been here!"

"That's all right!" pipes the Kid. "D'ye want us to do anything else?"

"Yes," she says. "Will you tell me where you heard that—that description of the—the million lovely loaves?"

"Sure," answers the Kid. "When we was comin' East, we stopped off at a hick burg somewheres and a guy took us over a bakery—"

Daughter claps her hands and laughs.

"Poetic justice!" she says. "That explains everything. My poor, dear father founded that bakery, and those were the last advertisements for it he wrote!"



CHAPTER VII

LIFE IS REEL!

The nation is bein' flooded these days with advertisements claimin' that any white man which works for less than forty thousand bucks a year is a sucker. The best of 'em is wrote by a friend of mine, Joe Higgins, who gets all of twenty bucks every Saturday at six—one-thirty in July, August and September.

The ads that Joe tears off deals with inventions. He shows that Edison prob'ly wouldn't of made a nickel over a million, if he hadn't discovered everything but America, and that Bell, Marconi, Fulton and that gang, wouldn't of been any better known to-day than ham and eggs, if they hadn't used their brains for purposes of thinkin' and invented somethin'. There's fortunes which would make the Vanderbilts and Astors look like public charges, explains Joe, awaitin' the bird which will quit playin' Kelly pool some night and invent a new way to do anything.

The ad winds up with the important information that the people which Joe works for is so close to the patent office gang that they could get French fried potatoes copyrighted. For the sum of "write for particulars," they'll rush madly from Washington papers that'll protect any idea you got, before some snake-in-the-grass friend plies you with strawberry sundaes and steals your secret. At the bottom of this there's a long list of things sadly needed by a sufferin' public, which will willin'ly shower their inventor with medals and money,—things like non-playable ukaleles, doctors which can guess what's the matter with you instead of your bankroll, grape fruit that won't hit back while you're eatin' it, non-refillable jails and so forth. All you got to do is stake yourself to a couple of test tubes, a white apron and a laboratory, hire Edison, Marconi, Maxim and Hennery Ford as assistants—with the U. S. Mint in back of you in case expenses come up—and you'll wake up some mornin' to find yourself the talk of Fall River.

I been lookin' over these ads for a long time, but there's three names I never seen on the list of famous inventors. They are to wit: the guy that discovered the only absolute cure for rheumatism, the one that invented the dope book on the female race and the bird that holds a patent on the complete understandin' of human nature. I guess the reason I never seen their names is because the thing ain't really been decided yet—there seems to be some difference of opinion. But if you wanna find out how many guys there are that swear they invented all them things, look up the population of the world. The figures is exactly the same.

I ain't met nobody yet which didn't admit they had the only correct dope on women, rheumatism and human nature, but I'm still waitin' to be introduced to the guy which really knows anything at all about any of 'em, when it gets right down to the box score!

The nearest I ever come to knowin' the original patentee to two of 'em was Eddie Duke. Eddie is one of the best men in the movable picture game, accordin' to everybody but himself. He concedes he's the best. He's a little, aggressive guy which would of prob'ly been a lightweight champion, for instance, if it hadn't been for his parents. They killed off his chances of makin' big money, by slippin' him a medium dose of education when he was too young to fight back. Eddie's like a million other guys I know, all Half-way Henrys, you might call 'em. Too much brains to dig streets and not enough to own 'em! Unhappy mediums that always calls somebody boss!

We're sittin' in Duke's office one mornin', when without even knockin'—a remarkable thing for a movie star—in walks Edmund De Vronde. Edmund has caused more salesladies to take their pens in hand than any other actor in the world. His boudoir is hung with pictures of dames from eight to eighty and from Flatbush to Florida. If some of 'em was actual reproductions, them dames was foolish for sellin' shirtwaists, believe me! Edmund is as beautiful as five hundred a week and built like Jack Dempsey. Off the screen he's as rough and ready as a chorus man.

"Hello, Cutey!" says the Kid, who liked De Vronde and carbolic acid the same way.

"I've come to ask a favor," says De Vronde.

"Well," Duke tells him, lightin' a cigarette and lookin' straight at the end of it, "we ain't gonna pay for no more autographed photos, we won't fire the press agent, you gotta finish this picture with Miss Hart and both them camera men that's shootin' this movie is high-class mechanics and stays! Outside of that, I'm open to reason."

"What I want will cost you nothing," says De Vronde. "That is—practically nothing. My dresser,—the silly idiot!—tendered me his resignation this morning!"

"Well, what's all this gotta do with me?" he asks De Vronde. "I can't be bothered diggin' up valets to see that you got plenty of fresh vanilla cold cream every morning and that they's ample talcum powder on the chiffonier! I got—"

"I have already secured a man," interrupts De Vronde. "He happens to be a—a—friend of mine. The poor fellow is desperately in need of work. He's in Denver at present, and I'd like to have him on as soon as possible. If we're to begin that big feature on Monday, I'm sure I can't be bothered thinking about where this shirt and that cravat is, and just what color combinations will be best for my costume in the gypsy cave."

"That's right!" grins the Kid. "Figure for yourself what would happen, if Cutey forgot his mustache curler, for instance. The whole country would be, now, aghast, and he'd be a nervous wreck in five minutes!"

"So if you'll kindly telegraph the fare to this address," goes on De Vronde, ignorin' the Kid, "I'll be obliged."

With that he blows.

"And the tough part of it is," moans Duke, reachin' for a 'phone, "I'll have to do just that! It'll cost about sixty bucks to import this bird here and when he gets here, it's nothin' but another mouth to feed. If I had half the nerve of that big stiff De Vronde, I'd take a German quartette over to London and make 'em sing the 'Wacht Am Rhein' in front of Buckin'ham Palace!"

"He claims this valet's a friend of his, too," says the Kid. "I'll bet he'll turn out to be another one of them sweet spirits of nitre boys, eh?"

"If he is," growls Duke, "it won't be two days before he'll be sick and tired of the movie game, you can bet two green certificates on that!"

A week later, me and the Kid is standin' near the entrance to Film City talkin' to Miss Vincent, when a young feller blows in through the gates and walks up to us. He's one of them tall birds, as thin as a dime, and his clothes has been brushed right into the grain. When the light hit him, I seen they was places where even the grain had quit. His shoes is so run over at the heels that they'd of fit nice and snug into a car track and he'd just gone and shaved himself raw.

One good look and this bird checked up as a member in good standin' of one of the oldest lodges in the world. They got a branch in every city, and they was organized around the time that Adam and Eve quit the Garden of Eden for a steam-heated flat. The name of this order is "The Shabby Genteels."

But what transfixed the eye and held the attention, as we remark in the workhouse, was this guy's face. I might say he had the most inconsistent set of features I ever seen off the screen. He ain't a thousand miles from bein' good-looking and his chin is well cut and square, like at one time he'd been willin' to hustle for his wants and fight for 'em once he got 'em, but that time ain't now! His eyes is the tip-off. They don't look straight into yours when he talks—the liar's best bet!—or they don't look at the ground, but they stare off over your shoulder into the air, like he's seein' somethin' you can't, and it ain't pleasant to look at.

I've seen that look on beaten fighters, when the winner is settin' himself for the knockout, and I've seen it on the faces of other guys, when some smug-jowled judge has reached into their lives and took ten or twenty years as a deposit on what they'll do with the rest. It's a look you don't forget right away, take it from me!

Well, this feller that's walkin' up to us had that look. If a director had yelled "Register despair!" at him, he could of just looked natural and they'd of thought he was another Mansfield.

And he's young! Get that?

"Pardon me!" he says, takin' off his hat. "Where can I find Mister De Vronde?"

The Kid puts his hand on his arm and swings him around,

"You'll pro'bly find him over behind the Street Scene in Venice," he tells him. "If he ain't there, look around the Sahara Desert for him—know him when you see him?"

The other guy looks at us for a minute like he thinks he's bein' kidded. Then he pulls a slow, tired grin.

"I think so," he says. "Thanks!"

When he walks away, I turns to Miss Vincent.

"That's prob'ly Cutey De Vronde's new guardeen," I says. "I guess he—"

"You and the Kaiser is the same kind of guessers!" butts in the Kid. "He guessed we wouldn't scrap! If that guy we was just talkin' to is a lady's maid for Cutey, I can sing like Caruso!"

"He doesn't look like a valet," says Miss Vincent, kinda doubtful.

"I don't blame him!" says the Kid. "And lemme tell you, he never got them muscles from brushin' clothes and buttonin' vests. I felt his arm when I swung him around that time, and this guy is just about as soft as the Rock of Gibraltar!"

"I can't understand," says Miss Vincent, "how a strong, healthy man can be a valet—ugh!" she winds up, with a little shiver.

"That's easy," sneers the Kid. "A man can't!"

Well, a man did! Gimme your ears, as the deaf guy said.

The next mornin' it turns out that I can guess like a rabbit can run. The new entry on the payroll borrehs a match from me, and durin' the tete-a-tete that folleyed, I find out that his name is John R. Adams and, as far as the world in general and America in particular is concerned, it could of been George Q. Mud. Durin' the lifetime of twenty-nine years he's been on earth, he's tried his hand at everything from bankin' to bartenderin', and so far the only thing he's been a success at is bein' a failure. At that he leads the league. And now, to top it all off, he's a valet for a movie hero!

"It's all a matter of luck!" he says, bitterly. "A man who tries these days is not an ambitious hustler, but a pest to the powers above him! I defy a man to stand on his own feet and make good without influence. It's not what do you know any more, but who do you know! I've been a bookkeeper, a printer, a salesman, a chauffeur, a bank clerk, and, yes, even a chorus man. At every one of those things I gave the best I had in stock to get to the front. Did I get there? Not quite!" he throws away the cigarette he's hardly had a puff of. "Why?" he asks me. "Because in every trade or profession there's somebody with half the sand and ability, who don't know the job's requirements but knows the boss's son! I'm not a quitter or I wouldn't be here, but I'm sick and disgusted with this thing called life and—"

"And that's why you never got nowhere!" breaks in a voice behind us—and there's Eddie Duke. Adams flushes up and starts away, but Eddie pulls him back.

"Listen to me, young feller!" he says. "I happened to hear your moan just now and your dope is all wrong. There ain't no such thing as luck; if there was, a blacksmith is the luckiest guy in the world and oughta make a million a minute, because he's handlin' nothin' but horseshoes all day long, ain't he? Forget about that luck stuff! Makin' good is all in the way you look at it, anyways. A bricklayer makin' thirty bucks a week, raisin' a family and bringin' home his pay every Saturday night in his pocket instead of on his breath, is makin' good as big as J. P. Morgan is—d'ye get me? Yes, sir, that bird can say he's got over! Makin' good is like religion, every other guy has a different idea of what it means, but there's many a feller swingin' a pick that's makin' good just as much as the bird that owns the ditch—in his own way! You claim a guy's got to know somebody these days to get over, eh? Well, you got that one right, I'll admit it!"

"Of course!" says Adams, brightenin' up. "That's my argument and—"

"That ain't no argument, that's a whine!" sneers Duke, cuttin' him off short. "Listen to me—you bet you gotta know somebody to get anywheres, you gotta know yourself! That's all! Just lay off thinkin' how lucky the other guy is, and give Stephen X. You a minute's attention. You may be the biggest guy in the world at somethin', if you'll only check up on yourself and see what that somethin' is! Remember Whosthis says, 'Full many a rose is born to blush unseen—' Well, don't be one of them desert flowers; come into the city and let 'em all watch you blush. Get me? How did you happen to meet this big stiff De Vronde?"

Adams gets pale for a second and clears his throat.

"I'm working for him," he says slowly, like he's thinkin' over each word before lettin' it go, "and I don't care to discuss him."

At just that minute, De Vronde, Miss Vincent, the Kid and another dame come rollin' up in Miss Vincent's twelve-cylinder garage-mechanic's friend. De Vronde hops out and walks over to us, wavin' his cane and frownin'.

"Look here!" he bawls at Adams. "I thought I told you to be at the east gate with my duster and goggles? You've kept me waiting half an hour, while you're gossiping around! Really, if you're going to start this way, I shall have to get another man. Look sharp now, no excuses!"

The Kid winks at me, noddin' to Adams who's lookin' at De Vronde with a very peculiar gaze. I couldn't quite get what he's registerin'. Miss Vincent looks interested and sits up. The other dame opens the door of the car and stands on the runnin' board.

"Here's where the fair Edmund gets his and gets it good!" hisses Duke in my ear, lookin' at Adams.

"I'm very sorry," says Adams, suddenly. "I should have remembered."

And without another word or look, he exits.

"Yellah!" snorts the Kid.

"No spine!" sneers Miss Vincent.

"Nick-looking boy—who is he?" asks the other dame, lookin' after him.

Duke slaps his hands together all of a sudden and gazes at her like a guy gettin' his first flash at his hour-old son. Then he looks after Adams, grins and claps his hands again.

"Who is he?" repeats the dame.

De Vronde sneers.

"Really," he says, "your interest is surprising. That fellow is my—"

"Shut up!" roars Duke, springin' to the runnin'-board. "Here!" he goes on, talkin' fast. "I'm gonna shoot them two interiors in half a hour, so you better call this joy ride off!" He turns to the strange dame and speaks very polite, "Miss Vincent will show you everything; if you want anything, just 'phone the office."